Resurgence

The interior of the Have-It-All had become a place of hushed conversations and secret meetings. Kallik, J’merlia, and Archimedes sat huddled—in so far as anyone could huddle with a creature the size of Archimedes—in the drive room of the ship.

“Master Nenda is very angry.” Kallik spoke with the authority of one who knows.

“Does he blame us?” J’merlia asked. Archimedes added, “Do you think he will disembowel me?”

Kallik looked puzzled. “Is there any reason why he should?”

“It is the standard way of registering disapproval among the Zardalu.”

“I would advise you not to point this out to Master Nenda. In any case, he is not angry with you, or with any one of us.” Kallik’s rings of bright eyes glanced in all directions to be sure that no one was approaching. “He blames Claudius, and to a lesser extent Sinara Bellstock.”

“But why?” Archimedes’s speech was improving fast, although he was still more comfortable with the master-slave language of the Zardalu. “Are we not in orbit around Marglot, as we wished to be? Kallik, it was your assurance that we had achieved our correct destination.”

“That is true. At least, we are orbiting a world with four poles. I cannot imagine many such specimens are to be found in the whole galaxy, still less in a small region of the Sag Arm.”

“Kallik, I see no poles. Yet you assert that my eyes are superior to those of everyone else on board.”

“What do you expect, pointers sticking out of the ground with labels on them? Archimedes, observe. The world below shows a clear demarcation into two hemispheres. There is a daylight side facing the sun, and another side which is in night. The day-night terminator constantly advances, since the world rotates. There is a fixed axis of rotation, and two poles are located at the ends of that axis. Let us call them, for convenience and in accordance with common usage, the North Pole and the South Pole. However, there is also a second division into hemispheres unrelated to sun position. Note that we have one side of high albedo, a bright half which faces always away from the gas-giant planet around which the planet orbits. Lacking a name, we will for the sake of convenience name that gas-giant world as M-2. Then we also have a less bright though sometimes cloud-covered side, always facing toward M-2.”

“I see those. But I do not understand their meaning.”

“You require training in simple orbital mechanics. Perhaps, on some other occasion, there will be time for such a thing. Meanwhile, observe.” Kallik gestured to the screen showing the planet below. “The gas-giant world M-2 is hot, with a mean temperature of eight hundred degrees. Marglot—for I am convinced that this world is Marglot—revolves around M-2. It is tidally locked to it, so that the same face of Marglot is always presented in that direction. That hemisphere, of course, will be warm, and its center will logically be known as the Hot Pole. The other face never receives any heat from M-2, and precious little from the parent star. Its brighter appearance, as spectral reflectance measurements confirm, derives from a surface covered with snow and ice. The center of that hemisphere, the coldest place on the planet, is the Cold Pole.”

“So you believe that we are exactly where we wish to be, at the world of the four poles. Why then is Master Nenda enraged at Claudius and at Sinara Bellstock?”

“Why, because they delayed us. Had we left Pompadour promptly, we would not be the last of the expedition to arrive. Thanks to Claudius and Sinara, we have been deprived of the possible advantages of getting here first.”

“Will Master Nenda disembowel Claudius and Sinara?”

“No. Could you perhaps cease this obsession with disemboweling?”

“I will try. But still I do not understand. When we first arrived, Master Nenda seemed pleased. He reported that there were no signal beacons from other ships, and therefore we were ahead of everyone else.”

“That was my fault.” J’merlia hung his narrow head in a human gesture of remorse. “I was operating the communications console, and I reported to my dominatrix, Atvar H’sial, that no ships’ transponders or signal beacons were active in this stellar system.”

“Was that a false statement?”

“No. But it was an insufficient one. I failed to search for the much weaker signals from individual suits, which transmit on different frequencies. To my shame, it was Master Nenda himself who thought to look for and discovered such suit signals, emanating from the surface of Marglot. Worse than that, all but one of the other members of the original expedition now appear to have found their way there. The signal from the suit of Lara Quistner alone is missing.”